Student profile
Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
If one were to follow my life as if it were an equation on a graph, they would find areas of cusp, a point where discontinuity occurs. They wouldn't be able to predict whether the line would go up or down because of how variable it is. What they would know, however, is that my passion is constant.
On the graph of my life, though, there were points in my younger years when this mindset seemed so far off the chart as to be inconceivable. For many years I felt the opposite way, in fact. Whenever I was assigned to a project, my lack of motivation to move outside of my comfort zone made me only strive to meet the bare minimum. I felt like I was only scraping by to satisfy my peers, parents, and teachers. The lack of meaning in the things I did began to disrupt how I viewed myself as a person. I did not want to be a horizontal line, to look back at the graph of my life and see no growth.
Because of this, I decided to change. I sought excitement in engineering and learning in general. Through robotics and coding, I found an outlet to express my creativity and passion for constructing things that I could only dream of previously. Robotics allowed me to analyze complex problems with an objective lens that could identify pros and cons of ideas. Coding provided an all-purpose analytical technique to solve problems, whether it is in everyday life or when I had to work at my CS internship.
I realize now that one way I embraced cusp was searching for and finding the practical application of everything I learn. Concepts I learn from physics, math, CS, and English can be used for large scale projects like traversing a database, adjusting torque to rotate a robotic arm, and even using rhetorical devices in order to make a plausible and compelling claim in a research paper. I look for practicality when I learn something new about the world, whether it be technical or philosophical. Perhaps that's why I love engineering so much. I am able to take principles and ideas from all the subjects I've immersed myself in to create something new.
Recently, at a robotics competition where many stellar teams participated, even when the situation was as bleak as the broken robot in front of my team, I never gave up. Instead, my hand darted towards hex keys, nuts, and even a hacksaw to repair the bot. These moments of frantically running towards a laptop to modify autonomous or manual code, are the ones I would never trade.
My heart races when I feel the excitement of creating a solution in a simple yet complex way. There's something exhilarating to seeing my invention come to life after spending countless hours toiling to make it work. In robotics, the code has to be simple enough for others to read through methods like abstraction, yet complex enough to fully implement all capabilities. Whether it be a database, a machine, or even an essay, I feel deeply satisfied when I've made something functional using basic principles to accomplish complicated tasks.
I know I've hit cusp when time disappears. When I do projects as difficult as setting up the back and front end of a database, I never see time as a constraint. I almost never glance at the clock when I do work that I love. Not finishing with elegance is devastating compared to not finishing on time. That discontinuity, that cusp, compels me to keep working, to search for those elegant, simple solutions for complex problems, to find the practical application for all I learn. I trust that the graph of my life, as variable as it may be, will push me into greater moments of cusp as I am challenged increasingly by all the future holds for me.